It has been said that the best camera for taking a picture is the one that you have with you. Perhaps this notion explains why mobile phones have become the most common camera for taking casual pictures. Many people carry a smart phone with them at all times, so a camera is literally always at hand. Further, the quality of cameras on smart phones has been improved to the point that such cameras now rival compact point-and-shoot cameras from just a few years ago. Thus, the development of photography with smart phones has contributed to a dramatic increase in the number of photos that people take.
People also retain far more photos now than in decades past. Previously, when each photo cost money to develop and required a coveted spot in a photo album to store, both financial and space limitations discouraged people from taking and keeping too many photos. Now, however, photos may be stored in digital memory indefinitely at a cost that is negligible, if not free. Digital photography, which enables multiple photos of a single shot to be taken cheaply and instantly reviewed, also encourages people to produce many more photos than was feasible with analog cameras and physical film.
These factors work together to produce a positive result: people are better able to memorialize in photos those special memories that make life enjoyable. Unfortunately, there is also a downside. With so many factors encouraging the taking and keeping of digital photos, people quickly create photo collections that number in the hundreds and then thousands of photos. Such immense photo collections can be unwieldy and overwhelming. Finding specific photos of a particular person or event can be difficult and time consuming. Generally, organizing a photo collection in a manner that facilitates enjoying thousands of pictures is a daunting task.
And yet photographs can be better enjoyed if pictures are organized such that desired subjects and photographs can be surfaced for viewing by a user. Thankfully, photographs that are in a digital format, such as those that are scanned into a computer or those that are taken by a smart phone, are capable of being electronically organized. For example, digital photographs can be organized electronically by the date the photographs were taken, by a location at which the photographs were taken, by manually applied tags, and so forth. Additionally or alternatively, digital photographs can be organized by human subject based on facial recognition technologies and associated workflows.
A photograph-oriented computing application is capable of organizing photographs based on the persons that are depicted in the photographs using facial recognition. With facial recognition, selected facial features from a photographic image are compared to faces in a facial database. Based on the results of these comparisons, the computing application offers a user various options for viewing the photographs based on the persons depicted. For example, groups of photographs can be displayed in which each group has those photographs that include a particular person having been identified via facial recognition. A photograph application may display to a user, for instance, a first group of photographs having pictures that each include a spouse, a second group of photographs having pictures that each include a sister, and a third group of photographs having pictures that each include a son. Such photographic grouping enables the user to find photographs of a particular desired subject.
Unfortunately, conventional approaches to photographic grouping produce sub-optimal results. One problem is that conventional approaches produce multiple different photographic groups that correspond to a single person. In other words, a conventional approach can result in a first group of photographs, a second group of photographs, and a third group of photographs that are directed to pictures that each include the spouse of the user. When this problem is multiplied by, for instance, two dozen individual subjects that result in over a hundred photographic groups for just those two dozen people, the user's goal of organizing the entire photographic collection by depicted subject is severely hampered.